Show an Image in Matplotlib with Different Colors and Channels

To slice an image into Red, Green and Blue channels with misc.imread, we can take the following steps −

• Set the figure size and adjust the padding between and around the subplots.
• Read an image from a file into an array.
• Make lists of colormaps and titles.
• Create a figure and a set of subplots.
• Zip the axes, images, titles and colormaps.
• Iterate zipped objs and set the title of each channel image.
• To display the figure, use show() method.

Example

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = [7.50, 3.50]
plt.rcParams["figure.autolayout"] = True

image = plt.imread('bird.png')
titles = ['With red channel', 'With green channel', 'With blue channel']
cmaps = [plt.cm.Reds_r, plt.cm.Greens_r, plt.cm.Blues_r]

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, 3)
objs = zip(axes, (image, *image.transpose(2, 0, 1)), titles, cmaps)

for ax, channel, title, cmap in objs:
   ax.imshow(channel, cmap=cmap)
   ax.set_title(title)
   ax.set_xticks(())
   ax.set_yticks(())

plt.show()

Input Image

Output Image